{"id":2607,"date":"2008-05-15T10:41:03","date_gmt":"2008-05-15T10:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/05\/15\/the-frankenstein-moment\/"},"modified":"2008-05-15T10:41:03","modified_gmt":"2008-05-15T10:41:03","slug":"the-frankenstein-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/05\/15\/the-frankenstein-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"The Frankenstein Moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Swans on Tea, Tom has a great story of his Frankenstein Moment<\/a>, that moment in science when the lightning flashes, and it’s immediately clear that everything just worked<\/strong>, and you have successfully reanimated your creation, or split the atom, or discovered high-temperature superconductivity, or whatever.<\/p>\n

As he says, these are rare. My own career has been lacking in real, definitive laughing-maniacally-during-the-thunderclap Frankenstein Moments. It’s not that I haven’t had experimental successes– I’ve done some things that I like to think are pretty cool– but most of them have been sort of delayed. The best candidate for a Frankenstein Moment would’ve been the time-resolved collision experiment<\/a>, which was something that I thought would take an afternoon that took three months and became a PRL. The crucial signal there was the appearance of a peak in the signal on the MCS we used for data collection, and its appearance was dramatic, but it was accompanied by a second, unexpected peak, and it took us two full days to realize that it was a real and useful signal, and not just some irritating electronic glitch.<\/p>\n

The closest to a real Frankenstein Moment was probably my very first experiment in grad school, on optical control of collisions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This was another experiment on ionizing collisions, where we monitored the collision rate by counting the number of ions produced from our atoms trap in some time interval. We were trying to modify the collision rate by shining in another laser, which could excite the colliding atoms to molecular states that would either enhance or suppress the collision rate, depending on the laser detuning.<\/p>\n

We set up a jury-rigged system with two different counters having digital readouts, one looking during the control laser pulse, and the other in a time when all the lasers were off. The ratio of these two numbers was the factor we cared about, and Matt Walhout and I tuned the laser to various different frequencies, and carefully wrote down the readings from the counters, with occasional arguments about the number of significant figures we should be using, and the rounding off of numbers, and so on.<\/p>\n

It was a slow process, not a single transcendent moment, but I still remember the excitement when we realized that we were, in fact, seeing the behavior we expected. Over the course of three or four data points, the control laser switched from enhancing the rate to suppressing it, exactly as predicted. We didn’t exactly high-five each other, but it does stick in my mind as one of the most exciting lab moments I’ve had. Early on, too– I was definitely hooked after that.<\/p>\n

Of course, for responsible scientists (as opposed to deranged lone geniuses in remote castles), the Frankenstein Moment is really only the beginning of the work. You get the biggest jolt from the first signal you measure, but then you need to buckle down and do all the vvariation of parameters and cross-checking of results, and all that other stuff that you need to do to be sure that the thing you saw was really the signal you thought it was, and that it behaves in the way you think it should.<\/p>\n

But there’s nothing like the moment when everything just clicks and that first good set of data shows up on the computer or in the lab book. It’s hard not<\/strong> to cackle maniacally at that point…<\/p>\n

So, what’s your Frankenstein Moment story?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Swans on Tea, Tom has a great story of his Frankenstein Moment, that moment in science when the lightning flashes, and it’s immediately clear that everything just worked, and you have successfully reanimated your creation, or split the atom, or discovered high-temperature superconductivity, or whatever. As he says, these are rare. My own… Continue reading The Frankenstein Moment<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,19,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-experiment","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}